How To Plot Your Charts & Indicators In RealTest

In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to set up your charts with all of your favorite indicators. Everything in real test is controlled using scripts. So we're going to go back to the previous script that we used to import our data and we're going to add a charts functionality to it so I can demonstrate exactly how it all works. So let's jump into RealTest now. So you can see here, we've still got the import section. What I'm going to do now is add a charts section and again you just start typing it and it'll come up in the drop down menu there for you. So we're going to start with chart and what you're going to do here is just specify whatever indicators you want to have on your charts. Let's just start with a simple moving average.

We'll just call it moving average 1 and let's make that a simple moving average. So it's going to type MA.

And we're going to do a moving average of the close and we're going to make it a 200 bar moving average. So once we do that, we can save that, apply that script. Then if we look at the chart that we've got of the NASDAQ 100, we can zoom in here and you can see we've got the 200 day moving average built on there. So we can add something else. Let's try adding RSI.

So we can type rsi. We want the Wilder's relative strength index and let's do a 30 period RSI and again.

We can apply that. Now if we look at the chart now, what you'll see is right down the bottom, the RSI is down here in a really basically horizontal green line. And the reason for that is it's plotted on the same scale as the price and the moving average. Obviously, RSI has its own scale between 0 and 100 and so we need to plot it on a different scale. So what we're going to do is come back into the script here and I'm going to add some curly brackets and I'm going to put the little hat in between the curly brackets. And when I do that and apply it, what that's going to do is put the RSI in the top pane above the chart. We could also put it, if we want it, below the chart. We can come in here and, and we can use the pipe function, the pipe key here. So the vertical line and then apply that and you'll see that that puts the RSI below the Chart, Typically we would put this sort of indicator above. Okay. The next thing you want to understand is how to change the formatting of the indicators that you're plotting. In particular, number of decimal points is something you probably want to change just so your charts don't get too messy. So if we come back into Real Test Script editor here we've got our RSI plot. Now let's imagine we want to format the RSI to have two decimal places. The way we do that is we'd format as a number using the hash and two, and that'll give us two decimal places. So if we hit apply and then come back to the chart here. So now you'll see on the right hand side, this vertical scale here has two decimal places. If we come back here and we decide we only want to make that one decimal place, we can change it to one, hit apply and and come back and you'll see it. There's only one here. So you can format the numbers like that as well. So you can plot as many things as you want in your chart script. You just want to format them to be either in the price window in the upper pane or in the lower pane. The lower pane is called the volume pane. Hey, if you're finding this video helpful and you want to go deeper with Real Test, I've put together a complete free program called Real Test Launchpad. The best part is it's completely free and you get lifetime access. So all you need to do is click the link in the description below and register to get access to RealTest Launchpad now. So if you want to learn RealTest fast and get up and running with confidence in the next couple of days, click the link in the description below and get access to RealTest Launchpad. You can just pause this video, click the link, get registered, and then come back. You'll get instant access to over 30 different tutorial lessons, showing you how to do all of the important functions in Real Test. So click the link below and I'll see you on the inside now. Now back to the video. Now that you know how to plot basic indicators, let's have a look at the charts window and the options are available to you in there. So I'm in Real Test now and you can see the chart window that we've created. And just like most Windows programs, when you right click, there's a contextual menu that you can use here. The first thing is you can right click on the price window and change it from a linear scale to a Logarithmic scale, which is quite useful, particularly if you're looking at large time periods. If you want to go back, you can untick logarithmic and we'll go back to linear. Let's zoom back in again here.

In addition to that, you can show the data as split adjusted or non split adjusted. So one of the great things about Real Test is it knows what all of the original pricing was and it also knows what the split adjusted pricing was. So in the chart you can see split adjusted or non split adjusted. It's not going to make a lot of difference in the NASDAQ chart. But if we look at the Apple chart and plot that one and let's look at split adjusted and then we can zoom all the way out and then if we look at not split adjusted, you can see the stock splits on the chart there. That's interesting and useful. So you know what the original pricing was before the stock split. But typically with your backtesting you're going to use split adjusted pricing. Okay, so we've got the logarithmic and the split adjusted. You can change the background color to black. I prefer a white chart, so I'm just going to leave that. And we can show and hide the crosshairs. So we can look at the crosshairs and it's going to show the date down the bottom and also the price or the value of the indicator across on the right hand side. And same when you move up here into the indicator pane. Same on the volume pane. So that's useful if you're trying to find the exact price or value of an indicator at a particular point on the chart. Hide the crosshairs for now. If we go into options, there's a few options we've got here. We can adjust the number of visible bars on the chart. I typically like to look at a couple of years on my chart. So I've got that set to about 400. But if you want a tighter time frame, you could set that to 200. Click OK and you can see that it zooms in. Or if you wanted to zoom in and out, you can hold down control and spin the scroll wheel on your mouse and that will zoom in and out for you as well. Let's go back to the options.

Bar size you can change from daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc. Just like most trading softwares. And over here you can change the different colors and line widths in the charts. So I'm not too fussed about changing those. But if you Want to change the default colors, then you can do that by clicking on the three dots here. Select a different color. So if you want to make the moving average for its, for example, a different color, you could do that. Probably the most useful is the logarithmic or non logarithmic chart. And you can also change it from a candlestick to a bar chart. I'll just uncheck Candlestick and you'll see it goes to bars and we go back to options. We can click Candlestick goes back to candlesticks. A couple of other useful functions that you've got access to in the right click menu on the chart. One of them is Show Data. And what this is going to do is show you the data, the numerical values for everything that's plotted on your chart day by day or bar by bar. So if you click on that, it's going to show you the numerical values for everything that's plotted on your chart. So I've got the date open, high, low, close volume, the moving average indicator, and the RSI plot. This is really great for being able to look over a particular period of time to see whether or not the indicator hit the value that you're after for your trading system. So useful way to debug and also understand what's actually going on. If you want to find where the crossover is or exactly when the RSI popped below or above a certain level, you can do that and use that to sense check your trading system signals as well. There are a couple of other useful things in this menu. If we look in here, you can hide the indicator pane. So you can do that. You can press the I key on the keyboard to show that. Again, that hotkey is shown here. You can hide the volume pane so you can show and hide volume by pressing the V key. And you can click show all bars, which shows you the entire history. Which is nice because sometimes you just want to look at how much history you've got available to you in the backtest. So if you just hit the A key or select Show All Bars, it'll zoom all the way out, show you all data for that stock. The last thing that I find useful here is copy image to clipboard and save images png. This can be useful if you're doing some trade journaling, if you're doing some research, if you're writing notes and brainstorming about system ideas, you might want to catch a snapshot of the stock that you're looking at with the various indicators and so on. On the chart and put it into your trading journal or your system development notes. So just copying the whole image to Clipboard or saving it as a.png file is useful for that as well. So that gives you a pretty good overview of the entire charting functionality. In Real Test. There's obviously more you can do plotting different indicators, changing formats, and so on, but this is enough to get you up and running so that you know how to chart everything that you need to chart in your Real Test window. So that's all for this video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.